A Year of Evermore

Starting something new is never easy. To succeed with a new product or service, you have to be able to differentiate yourself from the existing players in the market and communicate compelling reasons for customers to pay you money to solve their problems instead of someone else.

In the case of Evermore, we had our work cut out for us: we wanted to consolidate several markets into one, because existing services weren’t cutting it for people. It was all a mishmash of technical solutions designed for technical people. We believed focusing on the bigger picture and eliminating unnecessary, complicated steps for businesses and nonprofits would lead to a more enjoyable, more valuable web presence for them.

Proving Ground

About one year after debuting to the public on Post Status (a popular WordPress blog), our conviction and resolve is stronger than ever. The idea works. We can help organizations have compelling websites in a fraction of the time and cost of an agency, but with an even better post-launch experience (that’s the part that really matters, anyway). We can minimize stress and generate more time and budget for businesses to focus on revenue, and nonprofits to focus on awareness and engagement. We can keep sites protected from an onslaught of risks and vulnerabilities without having to ask business owners to lift a finger, or even think about it. And we do all those things.

Truly, our greatest struggle has been conveying the value of combining proven open-source technology with knowledgeable, friendly people to manage it. If you’ve built your site on a platform that looked promising only to find out it limited your ability to run your business—and had to start all over again—you understand the value and freedom in owning 100% of your site. If you’ve ever had your website hacked with no clear way of fixing it, or had it held hostage by a freelancer/agency/hosting company, or broken it by following instructions you found on Google—you understand how easily time and money can get consumed in an effort to simply stop worrying about your site again.

Turnaround Time

We frequently hear how great it is to have a brand new, professional site launched in a matter of days. It makes us incredibly happy to know how many hours we’ve given organizational leaders through making the website designing and building process fast. It goes from feeling like a burden to feeling like magic—and you end up with something you can be proud of.

Security

Website security is one of those things that doesn’t seem to matter until it matters a lot. In the past year, we’ve preemptively protected our customers from multiple vulnerabilities that were discovered and published online—including several critical, widespread issues with popular plugins.

Since we keep every bit of code (from WordPress to themes to plugins) updated on behalf of every customer—and only allow vetted, quality code to start with—none of those customers had to spend any time being worried about whether their site was vulnerable or not. We take that trust seriously.

(Existing customers: If you’re interested in an outline of the things you’ve been protected against as a customer this year, just get in touch. I’ll be happy to show you all the nerdy things we’ve done to protect your business.)

Contrast this against a newly-launched customer who shared a conversation with their previous host. Support notified him that his site was vulnerable and malicious files existed on his site … and then told him to learn FTP and fix it himself.

It’s a prime example of how fast things can get complicated when you go it alone. It’s hard to know what’s even involved in “fixing” something that’s wrong. That’s probably one big reason why only about 1/3 of WordPress sites have updated to the latest version—who knows what could happen! Things can break if themes or plugins aren’t well-written, and it gets complicated to “undo” that. Yet, not keeping things updated is, maybe, the biggest security risk you can introduce. Our customers never have to worry about making that choice.

Hosting & Support

We’ve spent the last year continually improving upon an already fast, reliable hosting infrastructure. This speed is playing a huge part in helping customers achieve the best SEO possible, as the quick loading times are coupled with quality code.

We’ve done that by expertly curating designs (themes) and features (plugins). Your average hosting company lets you upload whatever you want, so you’re left to not only choose from over 10,000 themes and 40,000 plugins, but you have to hope that each developer who built them will continue to support and maintain it. Your average hosting company certainly won’t help you with these when things go wrong, but we’ve eliminated that concern for our customers, too. Everyone’s website stays fast and secure, because we ensure quality to begin with, and then support 100% of everything ourselves. It’s a winning combination.

As we continue to grow, maintaining this level of excellence is a top priority. We will continue take care of the technical details in the background by going way above and beyond what any other managed WordPress host would do, so that interactions with our support team revolve around using your website to support your business. Isn’t that why you have a website to begin with?

Ever-Improving Features & Designs

In order to help customers continue to have a successful web presence, we continue to invest in bringing new, quality functionality to Evermore. The day you sign up with us, you gain access to over $500 worth of premium features and designs from the best developers in WordPress, and you get all your questions answered by us instead of having to keep up with a bunch of other logins and forums.

On top of keeping these features and designs updated, we’re always adding new ones that meet the needs of your business. More than just paying for hosting and support (which is already well worth the fee), you get access to these curated features and designs backed by a knowledgeable Evermore team. It’s more than just getting new, shiny things—we partner with customers to add all the value we can to their web presence.

A Year of Empowerment

We’ve spent a lot of time talking and writing about the value of Evermore in the last year, but we’ve been most successful in proving the value—resulting in a lack of focus on getting the word out about that value to begin with! Normally, you might expect that our next move would be about investing in traditional marketing. We believe in a better way to spread the word: awesome customers.

Evermore is truly great when our customers are truly great at using their web presence to help their organization—whether that’s through conversions or donations. Here’s just a few ways we’ll be investing even more in our current and future customers in the coming year:

New team members are bringing knowledge and care to Evermore through account management, support, content creation, and more.

New content (coming soon) will focus on empowering businesses and nonprofits to use their web presence to grow their business. Less about us, more about you.

New and existing partnerships with homegrown, local businesses who specialize in areas like copywriting, SEO, marketing, and social media are all strengthening. We’re investing in our community, and working with these businesses to create ideal packages for Evermore customers that want to take the money they save on their website (creation, hosting, and maintenance) and spend it on efforts that will bring more leads to their site.

New streamlined professional services will let you choose to have Evermore take care of some of the details when you’d rather focus on your business, complete with no-hassle billing.

New efforts to show our love and support for longtime customers will start showing as well. 🙂

You’ll see these pieces and more in the coming months. We’re here to make better business and nonprofit websites by helping you focus on what matters, and we take that seriously—with everything it entails.

We look forward to the best year of Evermore yet. As always, feel free to email me directly if you’d like to chat.